To be released
7
Patrick cares for precision and does not suffer shoddy thinking. This makes for a truly densely packed episode where we not only cover the previous topics, but also one where my observation skills get sharpened live.
Topics:
- How is AI changing the landscape of creative work?
- What skills will remain uniquely human in creative fields?
- How can creative professionals adapt and thrive in an AI-enhanced world?
Patrick Kizny is an entrepreneurial creative at heart. After decades running creative businesses of all kinds, he's now working on spatial sound. He's also a friend. We first spoke regarding ideas for a deck of cards that would productize Patrick's methodology. But our calls evolved from that. When I need honest feedback and a clinical attention to detail, I turn to Patrick.
Patrick Kizny
hello Patrick. hello everyone. We are here with Patrick Kizny and Patrick has been running creative businesses for over 20 years and he has been seeing both sides of that, of that world, both the creative side and also the, you know, "keeping the lights on" side. And what's interesting, what I find the most interesting about Patrick's perspective is that he really has this attentive look at the details of how these things work and what are the best ways to find new approaches to making this art of work function as a career and as a way to make a living. So Patrick, thank you, thanks so much for joining us here at Exotic Matter.
Exotic matter. I love it already. Pleasure. Pleasure being here with you.
Yes, thank you. Thank you so much. You're the first one, as I told you. Audience, I hope you and Patrick be patient with me. So, Patrick, would you like to add a little bit detail into this introduction I've made of yours as a creative leader for over 20 years?
Yeah, I think there is no best way of running your business in your life. There is only a way but you know, whoever is giving you five easy ideas to run your company, know in a perfect way or the best way or all this kind of bullshit is simply lying and there is no best way and the second thing is that the world has changed drastically recently and... You know, we have to embrace the fact that we don't know anything and what used to work doesn't work anymore. And if people are doing things that they used to do, you better be quite careful about drawing conclusions out of that because they are doing it only because of inertia. They are not doing it because it works. Like the fact that people still keep doing things that they used to do and that used to work doesn't mean they still work. Right? That's all it is.
Mm-hmm. Yeah,inertia is a great concept here because sometimes we meet people that they seem to operate as if the last five years didn't happen. it's really strange that the running on hopes, right? Living on a prayer kind of thing. It will work eventually, but the world is not what it used to be. So it can't work like that. There's a... When we started talking, Patrick and I, I think there was an undercurrent of a theme that we'vediscussed many times, which was this... using creativity not just as means to an end, but like the way to actually get good stuff done, right? And I've always seen you as a big defender of...Creativity, Patrick. And I think you have like several creative pursuits, right? You are involved in several creative activities, so to say.
Well, depending on how you count it, but to put it in perspective, I've run creative shit for about 20 years. I've been running my companies and I used to pivot many times. So if you count all the kind of like incarnations of my main studio or different ventures that I've built and run over the years, there is like probably seven major pivots or something like that. So yeah, I've been into many things.
Okay, so pivot. Pivot is an interesting idea here. Can you remember some of the pivots and what was the trigger for you to make that pivot?
Yeah, that was either market getting shit or me getting bored or both. So, you know, I started my first agency in the early 2000s, right after the dot-com boom. I mean, dot-com boom burst, right? So probably the worst possible time to start an interactive agency and doing web shit. But that's what I did and it ran for a few good years until 2008 where the financial crisis came and hit and my company was at that time working for the financial sector. So, you know, that was the first trigger for a pivot because overnight my company was entirely wiped out and we lost 100 % of our clients. So, well, we had to rebuild it and half a year later I was doing something else. So that was the first one. And then from interactive agencies and all this kind of like web oriented things and a little bit of design and branding, because guess what? People still needed and wanted designers at that time. They didn't fall for the stupid idea that now they can use Canva and they don't need designers. Right. These were good old days. You could make a living designing. So, you from there I moved over to more of a filmmaking side and I did co-found a tech brand which produced motion control equipment for filmmakers. And, you know, I've become a world-renowned cinematographer specialized in motion control and time-lapse for a few good years. And from there evolved towards a director. You know, the second leg was still in the agency and creative work. you know, after that period, I guess it's converged loosely around 2017 into me running ACG and visual effects studio, which was going pretty well until 20, I don't know, 2023 when the shit happened. And then the market changed drastically at least for us. So... These are the main ventures and on the side around 2022, I started building a creative and strategy powerhouse for Space Tech, which was an entirely stupid idea.
I that, that's how I first came across you, was like, this is really interesting, I remember that.
Yeah, and well, right now I guess I'm back to art and creating and I still consult in the creative space, advising on business and marketing. So yeah, that's the chapters in a nutshell. And on top of that, I'll be producing a special sound festival in an interesting place.
Yeah, I wanna know more about that. But I have a question before that, which is... You've been, you are kind of a battle-worn creative. You've been through several thresholds that are difficult. And I feel that for some industries, perhaps not so much for the agency side, but a little bit more for the consulting side, the changes seem to be, right now, the current changes seem to be really strong. And I feel that... Some consulting firms are less used to the changes. I think the creative side has been true, right? So it's kind of a more of a new thing to some of them. From your perspective, if this is true, from your perspective, are there signs that people should be paying attention to like, things are like, what can be ignored and what cannot be ignored in terms of signs that the market is sending you as a business owner that you need to change the way you do things?
Okay, but do you ask as a consultant or for consulting businesses or for agency businesses or both in general?
Very good. Now, my point is you've been through this mostly from the agent creative agency side, right? And I think that the consulting side has seen less of this, a little bit, but less of it, less of it. So I think you have more experience in seeing the tide turn and adapting. So as an experienced tide turner, what kind of signals do you pay attention to that consultants could also, you know.
Yeah. Right. Gotcha. So the question is what can consultants learn from an agency owner going through the shit many times? Okay. Well, I think it's an entirely different business because as a consultant you are in the business of knowing more than you are in the business of doing and majority of creative firms are still in the business of doing and in the business of pixels pushing or whatever that is that they do...
Much better phrased,
... which is a leftover from a golden era of creativity because for the last 20 or 30 years you could run a creative business doing pretty things with computers and that was cool enough on its own. But this has changed drastically and in my perspective for the agency side of things, the only logical transition, of course, generalizing is to...
Yeah
... transition to a consulting model, meaning that you are becoming a business partner and you're not being in the business of execution anymore. Because on the execution, there is no reasonable way of defending your strong position on the market. Yeah, still you can be a company that is in the hands business and operates under a factory model. Which is generally good vendorship, yes, you can build a decent business on that. But also this is also changing, like just look at what happened to a range of large VFX houses that crashed recently, right? You have Technicolor collapsing, you have The Mill going underwater and a range of other companies that folded. And the reason for that is that even at their scale Being in the doing business and being in the execution mode, in the factory mode, even with their inertia and power, because we're talking about huge ships, it's not always working, because the market always wins. So, long story short, you have to pay attention to...
market at all.
... what's happening on the market because ultimately the market always wins, right? But what can consultants learn from that? Well, I think that the business of consultancy has changed drastically, independently of the factors that creative agencies business changed. And the reasons for that is tremendous amount of noise and fakeness in the internet.
Mm-hmm.
Which is simply making it almost impossible to cut through. Like, if you open LinkedIn and look at how many agency consultants you have, there are like legions of them, right? And if you start thinking about how many of them are actually making any business and making living on it, this is probably less than 1 % or something like that, right? Like everybody's trying to do that, but people that really do some work, it's very little of them.
And okay, but this is a great segue into, think, your spatial sound festival, because it's really difficult to stand out on the timelines, right? There's a lot of content, there's a lot of noise, and to stand out, need to perhaps do different things. And when we started this conversation, before we hit record, you were telling me about a festival that you're preparing now but it's a continuation of something that started like 15 years ago or something, right? And this is a physical thing, right? It's in a place. Can you tell me more about that and how you came to think of it?
Now. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'll do. Before I go there, let's correct one thing. you said something like that... Let me uncover the assumption, the hidden assumption, right? Unspoken assumption, because that's what it is about.
I love corrections. Okay, fair enough. Fair enough.
We talk about the business of consulting or advisory or whatever that is. So being a knowledge worker and succeeding and you made an assumption or that in order to succeed with your business, you need to stand out on timelines. I think that's an entirely flawed perspective because social media does not work this way anymore. And
It's not the world, it's just a part of it, right?
It's a very weird part of the world, very fake. And frankly, you asked about what are the things we should pay and shouldn't pay attention to? I think you shouldn't pay attention to social media. Like if you want to do any business, whether it's in consulting or creative or whatever else, I think the last thing you should be doing is paying attention to social media and betting on social media because these days...
Yeah.
This is a game that you cannot win and the house always wins. And we are at the end of social media where big platforms don't need content creators anymore or don't need interesting or intelligent people participating because they already have enough inertia and position and power, et cetera, et cetera. And they bluntly entered the... You know, the extraction tyranny. And you cannot compare the situation today to the situation which we knew from, you know, five, 10, 15 years ago, where you could start sharing your expertise in form of a blog or a book or, you know, posting online or doing stuff like that in order to convert it to business. These things don't work anymore. So, you know, yes, people still keep doing that. They are fed with these beautiful, beautiful lies that you need to push a little bit harder and be a little bit smarter and be a little bit more creative in terms of creating your content so that it resonates with audiences and all this kind of bullshit. But the reality is that you don't have any control over your reach and stuff like that because it's capped by the platforms and by design.
Yours truly.Yeah.
Yes, are ways, there are still ways to get following and stuff like that. Mostly black techniques, black hat techniques. But all of a sudden, if you start following that path, you're not building a business, you're becoming a servant to these companies, extracting your time, your attention and your creativity for the sake of something stupid.
Yeah, yeah, Tell me more about the thing you're doing differently, because I agree with this on many, levels and I could talk about this for a long, time. But what I think you're doing different from other people that I talk to is that you're doing things in the real world that actually generates connection, opportunities, interesting things, genuinely interesting things. you told me about the... Tell me more about the special festival, please.
So 15 years ago as a filmmaker I arrived at the beautiful abandoned temple in the western and southwestern Poland which was formerly German and this was probably one of the most profound experiences in my life. This place is absolutely amazing. And over a weekend I shot a film named The Chapel. You can still Google The Chapel, Kizny will find it. And guess what? It hit over a million views over just a week or something like that. Which was quite a good result for an independent film. And that coincided with me being a partner at the motion control equipment company. So we were shooting time-lapses where we were pioneering this crazy new niche, crazy new technology. And this is not only about time-lapses, this is also about like HDR and motion control and all this kind of like crazy stuff, but it's not what made the film famous. So, well, I showed it there and for my business partner at that time, that was just a commercial, for me that was much more. And following that film, two things happened. First of all, I started being invited to international conferences regarding heritage preservation and technology and culture and all these kinds of things, including some very prominent events, gave a TED talk about it and all this kind of stuff and my main angle on this was about the impact of independent projects and how through creativity we can impact reality. You can shoot an independent film with zero financing and turn a ruined church into something that is, you know...
Yes
Today it's cultural venue and cool events are happening there, And all it takes is creativity, vision and following your guts and doing something wonderful, right? So anyways, following these conferences, which were cool, I didn't feel fulfilled creatively. And I came back to that place and shot another crazy film, which is called Rebirth. And I was into innovation, I loved innovating in the visual world, so I reached for a range of crazy technologies, including laser scanning. that was one of the things that was first time ever used in film. Like laser scanning has been used in heritage documentation and in architecture and engineering for already a decade. But what was novel about my approach is that I used these scans, which are like billions of points in space and I visualized them in a cinematic way so that instead of using this data set to help me remodel the 3D thing and render it using traditional 3D technologies, I turned it into like directly, right? Put the data set on the screen and came up with ways of visualizing it in a way that looks cinematic and you can put it on par with like Hollywood Grades VFX.
Mm-hmm.
Anyways, so yeah, so there was this film and it was much deeper, much more elaborate and much more complicated, much longer. I worked on it for like five years and guess what? Nobody watched it because it was too good, too serious, too complicated, too long for the internet. between 2010 and 2014 and 2015, a lot of things changed in the internet. Vimeo stopped being a community platform, the interest for independent filmmaking started being lower and lower, and generally these kind of things didn't really get traction on its own, even if they were good. So anyways, then I was crazy busy doing business for the next decade or something like that. And recently, since I closed my studio, I'm back to more creative endeavors and well... I'm back there and it's not abandoned anymore. It's a cultural venue right now and we're producing a spatial sound festival. So this space, which is still mesmerizing, although it's a little bit renovated, we're turning it into a massive virtual instrument. we'll arrange the whole space, is mind blowing. Go check it out. We're turning it into a spatial sound instrument.
So here's what I like about this story and how I think it's such a good example of what I think is your way of looking at the world. So there's an aspect of it which is related to seeing opportunity where others are not seeing opportunity. Like you went to this church that was in ruins and you said there's something here that other people are not seeing. There's an aspect of it related to just pure creativity, like, I wanna do something with this, nobody's paying me to do it, nobody asked me to do it, but I just wanna do it. There's an aspect of it of changing the discourse with the product of your creativity, like, it changed how people were thinking about that, it created opportunity, which is also good for business, made a real impact. Because as I remember you telling me this, the church was in ruins.
It's making impact, real impact in the world.
15 years ago and now it's not in ruins and it's a lively place. And finally, this idea of you use technology in all aspects of that work, not so much technology as a creative tool, not just as a, you know, to accelerate the production of...
Yeah, exactly.
... of creative outputs. Of course it helps, but it's more to create new possibilities in terms of creative outputs, right? It's not to do things faster, it's to do things better, more interesting, in a new light. And to me, these things are really like Patrick, right? This is the mental picture I have of Patrick. And when you talk about creativity being the only way, or there are no cookie cutter ways of running a business, it's always very contextual. need to figure things out.
Yeah.
I keep seeing like echoes of this using creativity both for itself but also collecting the fruits it gives you in a business sense, right? Which I think is this story have connects perfectly with that. And finally, I think the fifth thing that caught my attention with this story is that it's... it's sidesteps the whole crying about reach. It's just like we go to a place. And we do things on that place and people that go to that place are a community already. So what I've been thinking a lot about this whole era that we're living in is that we are a little bit addicted to the idea of, you know, just shouting into the void and maybe the void shout something back, but the void is not shouting, it's just eating up our stuff. And... Perhaps a more productive way of dealing with that is let's not shout into the void, let's create other things that do not require the void to exist. Does this vibe with you in any way?
No, absolutely. Reflecting on that, across my career I've been through the ups and downs and on both sides of the tide in terms of using social media or sort of social media, because back when I started there was no social media yet. It's 2005 and even blogging doesn't exist yet. But anyways...
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
When I shot The Chapel, that was a moment where what you could call an organic inbound worked, meaning I did create something good. I put it to the world and people reacted to this. And this film, this single film, converted into probably two years worth of business for me. Me flying all over the world, shooting crazy projects from Middle East to shooting crazy time lapses on Coachella right in the US. that was cool, right? And it's not only this film because I remember when I got into time-lapse, I started sharing my expertise. It wasn't even expertise yet, right? You could call it expert positioning these days, but you know, what I did was like I was getting into something, I was super hyped about it and I started sharing my learnings and insights. And of course that was much more than everybody else knew, but I wasn't an expert in the sense of like having spent my entire life doing this shit, right? Because that was new. When you're on the bleeding edge of fucking innovation, pardon the words.
There are no experts at the frontier, right?
Exactly. Exactly. I mean, you can be an expert at always innovating and if I'm an expert at anything, that's just this, but it's not about being an expert, it's about being myself. But anyways, so it worked, right? And then it stopped working and, you know, Vimeo, again, Vimeo stopped being community, people stopped watching short films. I mean, not so much as it used to be in 2010 or 12. And, you know, social media started arising and getting a little bit more saturated, etc. But anyways, I... Did profit business-wise from the things in the past and for the next decade or something like that I wasn't even touching social media. I wasn't there. I wasn't paying attention. I wasn't using it at all. It didn't exist for me. It's luxury. Yeah. So anyways, know, 2010-ish to 2015-ish, let's say that was a time where organic inbound worked for me.
That's luxury. That's the definition of luxury today, yes.
And it wasn't about producing content and being crazy, you know, creative about what the fuck should I post on my timeline today and how should I hook it. Just, you know, putting genuine stuff out there and it worked, right? Anyways, it stopped working and the next large chapter in terms of business was building...a more predictable and more dependent on my activity, new business machine, which coincidentally started with outbound marketing. And when we started doing it around 2015, 2016, know, people were sending newsletters, but nobody was doing personalized outreach at a scale. Right. So I was for my studio, I was among the first people using the very first tools and workflows to essentially personalized emails, which looked like a person-to-person email, not as a newsletter, because that's the picture of internet in 2015. And methodically started building relationships and putting myself out there in front of companies that we wanted to work with. And guess what? That worked pretty well. And I built a successful business using just that, no fucking social media. Which was running until 2023, when the shit happened and the market crashed. So...
But sorry to interrupt you here, I think this is really important. The market crashed not because of this strategy, right? This more personalized outreach, it worked and then the other context changed. So by the market crashing, it does not invalidate that creating relationships was... This is more for the listeners than for you, I know that this is not what you're saying. But I wanted to make sure that we got that.
No, no.
So the market crashed, but that does not invalidate the value of taking that approach it just described. Did I get it right?
Yes and no. Okay, let's dive into that. So first of all, when I say market crashed, I mean the creative market crashed, meaning the reality for majority of creative firms worldwide started changing and I've seen it globally, meaning we stopped seeing clients from the US working with us, we stopped seeing clients from the Middle East working with us, and we've seen clients from China stopped working with us.
Never a straight yes. Mm-hmm.
So in generally, that was a global crash. The reasons of that crash is that around 2022, late 2022, there was a mass amount of layoffs in the tech industry in the US, primarily in the US. So this impacted marketing budgets and creative industry big time. And that's one thing. The second thing is that for many creative companies, particularly in the visual creative side of things. In 2022 and three, we were past the hype cycle or past the boom cycle, which happened right after COVID. So like what happened? COVID hit, film production went down entirely, people couldn't shoot. And because of that, everybody wanted to start producing animations, right?
Mm-hmm.
And the same goes for design, same goes for e-commerce and all these kind of things. So a huge chunk of creative companies and marketing companies had amazing time between 2020 and 2022. So this ended and it accelerated some changes that were inevitable anyway. So these things happened in 2023 and that's why the markets for creative and marketing companies changed. Which is independent from the end of Outbound, but the end of Outbound happened for some reason. And this reason is AI. Meaning since the end of 2022 or 3, can't remember, 2022, chat GPT came out and everybody started using this shit to flood all possible communication channels, right? Which meant that Outbound wasn't sending 200 emails and getting...
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm, that's it.
75 % response, it started about sending millions of emails to get a percentile of response. So if you ask me frankly, outbound collapsed. And inbound did too, because we rely on social media and search engines and all these kind of things and they don't work anymore. I mean, they do work, but in favor of their owners, not everybody else.
Got it. They work exactly the system work the way this system works is exactly what it does. Perfect. Well, not perfect, but perfectly put. So we're nearing the end of this episode and there's a couple of things flying around here. And I think the first one that I would like to explore is maybe not explore because it's a big word for the end of the podcast, but the one that I'm trying to latch onto is in this context, with this perspective that you have, and you're moving into more localized action, in a sense, at least with the festival, how are you approaching the act of getting interest into the festival and people joining, participating, being a part of it?
Frankly, I don't know. Let's figure it out. Audience building is... First of all, the festival is small. It's a small thing. need probably something around 200-300 people over three or four days of the festival. So it's not a major undertaking. But yeah, with social media not really working, that's going to be quite a challenge. But well, the scale is small, so I'm not worried about it.
Let's figure it out. Mm-hmm. When is the festival? So we know to ask you after the festival end of August. So at the end of after the end of August in September, October, we talk again and we figure out what were the lessons learned from... from that. do you feel? OK, that's another lesson learned. So many lessons to learn. Very good, very good. So this was, as was expected, very provocative. I think Patrick and provocative go together and.
End of August. Provided it gets funded.
It's interesting and also funny a little bit how you make sure that, you know, I get the details right and you don't let, you know, shoddy thinking, past true go through. So that's important. And I think it just adds to the quality of the episode. So I want to thank you for that, for making the time and making a very making it not just the time, but like being very present, very attentive, not letting the small stuff slip through. And for Patrick, for the people listening which at this stage is maybe me and my mom. I don't know, let's figure it out. How can we find more stuff from you? More links? mean, where can we know more things about Patrick Kizny?
Kizney.com is my personal website. K-I-Z-N-Y. Kizney like Disney .com. This is my personal website and there is a track record of businesses I've run and pointers to what I'm doing. There are no pointers to the festival yet. The festival is named Echotronica with E-C-H-Echotronica and well, there are blank social media right now. So please feel free to follow us.
Mm-hmm.
And well, my consulting side of things, I run a thing called Future Crafting, which is the consultancy for creative businesses. And there is a podcast and a lot of insights that I've been sharing over last year, which is futurecrafting.express, but you can find the link from my personal website.
Perfect. You have a newsletter also from that, Okay, okay. So, yeah, yeah. Everyone's on Substack apparently. I'm also on Substack. So again, thank you for this and talk to you soon. Best of luck with the first half.
Yeah, some subs. Pleasure. Thanks for having me.